NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

However, as children map their initial meanings onto word forms, they must make certain
decisions. Does word X pick out an object or an action, a state or a property, a relation in
space, or an event with many participants? In making an initial decision, children
presumably must attend to their existing ontological categories, and pick out whatever is
salient - an entity or action, say - for which they do not yet have any label, as their initial
target.

The promising response to the induction puzzle is to suggest that there is a range of
different capacities as well as pragmatic directions underlying word learning (Macnamara,
1982; Kuczaj, 1982; Bloom 1997). Those capacities are the “linguistic capacities”
(syntacting bootstrapping hypothesis, semantic bootstrapping hypothesis); and the
“conceptual capacities” (thinking of the word as representing objects, properties, events
and other entities). A discussion of both types of capacities, as well as alternative
explanations, such as Nelson’s interactive functional model for lexical acquisition and the
role of pragmatic directions for word learning follows in the next subsections.

2.3.1 Linguistic capacities

How do children solve the mapping problem and work out what a phonological string
refers to ? One of the explanations to the mapping problem assumes that children succeed
in it by observing the contexts in which words are uttered. For instance, the sentence “is
an elephant” is uttered when a large grey animal with a trunk is present, and so the child
deduces that this is the referent. These explanations have been termed the “syntactic” and
the “semantic bootstrapping” hypotheses.

2.3.1.1 Syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis

One clue to meaning is the syntactic context in which a word is used. The ability to use
syntactic context to infer meaning is referred to as syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman,
1990).Children use information about syntactic cues to hazard guesses about the
denotation of words - syntactic bootstrapping- (Gleitman, 1990). Gleitman, emphasizes
that word meaning acquisition does not take place in a vacuum, but instead occurs in a
larger context, one context being the sentences in which children initially hear novel words
(McShane, Whittaker & Dockrell, 1986; Bloom, 1994; Bloom & Kelemen, 1995; Lederer,
Gleitman & Gleitman, 1995; Naigles & Hoff-Gingsberg, 1995).

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